


Ungrounded

by Ironlawyer



Category: Marvel Ultimates
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Suicide Attempt, Ults Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 08:23:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16322684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer
Summary: The future is bleak and Steve struggles to cope with his life now. Tony is about to make that struggle even more difficult.





	Ungrounded

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Ults Day 2018. 1610 words in celebration.

Sweat damp sheets, sticky with blood that isn’t his, dark with ash and dust and the lingering reminders of a battle barely won. Stuck to him like a layer of dried paint. He blinks into the darkness and feels more awake than he wants to. Remembers collapsing here only hours earlier and wishes he could sleep away the demons that live in his memories. Wishes he could tune out the sound of screams and dying breaths with the sitcoms and soap operas that distract him in the day.

Day to day, he drifts. Live and work and fight some more. Come home, fall asleep in an empty bed, in an empty home, wash away the blood and memories in the morning and repeat.

He thinks of Tony. Always does when he wakes up like this. Rich man, known a life that Steve doesn’t understand. He wonders if Tony’s sleeping soundly tonight or if he too hears the screaming of the ones they didn’t save.

He peels his sheets from his uniform and his uniform from his skin, walks slowly across the creaking floorboards. Steps into a shower that runs hot and cold, watches the blood and mess still stuck to his skin spiral down the drain and thinks of the people it belonged to. It feels good to be free of it, but the thought hangs somewhere, that it’s not so easy to wash this all away. It runs too deep.

He feels like he’s sleepwalking through life sometimes and wonders what it would take to wake him up. He does his best to adapt and change but it’s a people’s world and he is an alien in it. A machine. A soldier. He does what he has to because it’s the only life he knows now.

He turns the shower off and stands dripping on the cold tile floor, listening to the sound of his neighbours fucking on the other side of the plasterboard walls. His life has changed, maybe, but people haven’t.

He thinks again of Tony. Wonders if he’s fucking someone too – if he stepped out of that shining suit, as untouched as if he’d never been there. Smiled that easy smile and shrugged it all off as easy as he seems to. Steve envies him. His carefree attitude, the way life runs off him like water. Steve wants to be around him, like if he stands close enough for long enough he can absorb some of that vibrancy.

He imagines women fall at Tony’s feet. Men too, maybe. He feels guilty for thinking it, for the picture it brings to his brain, sitting there stagnating something awful in the pit of his stomach.  He imagines Tony on his knees and starts to get hard. Closer to the bathroom wall, step by traitorous step to listen to the moans of man and woman, and remind him of how it should be.

He runs the towel though his hair, pushes it against his eyes and burns away the images that try to linger in his mind. Thinks of the men and women who died last night and the things he should be feeling. He wants to let go of his grief but when he does the guilt cripples him.

The bedroom is quiet. The thoughts of sex shut away with the bathroom door. He sees the bloody uniform and bedsheets strewn across the floor and wonders if this is better.

Puts his civvies on, and thinks of running somewhere. Opens the window instead, lets the night air hit his face and listens to the traffic and the shouting and the new nature of the city that isn’t his anymore.

He turns his back on it. Pulls the box out from under his bed, rifles through the dusty porn magazines and crumpled newspaper he hid it amongst, rests the helmet Tony gave him on his lap and wonders what he’s doing here.

The future is bright and ugly and remote, and Tony gave him this and Steve is choosing his own loneliness and pride. He wants to be the kind of man he once was, when he wore this helmet. When he remembered how to be happy, instead of angry and sad and scared.

It’s two am. Tony is probably sleeping in the arms of a beautiful woman, but that makes him want it all the more. Steve is drawn to his charisma, needs his unique brand of hedonism tonight. _Let’s drown these sorrows in a glass of single malt,_ Tony would say, maybe. Steve would’ve sneered at that once.

He runs his fingers across the dents and scratches. Weather worn and well aged, the helmet isn’t what it used to be.

He’s going to visit Tony.

\----

Jarvis lets him in, his fuzzy slippered feet shuffling on the floorboards, but bright eyed and sunny smiled like Steve isn’t selfish and stupid and _why the fuck is he here_. Jarvis points him to the master suite without question and shuffles back to his own room _if that will be all, sir._

He puts his ear to the door, listens for snoring or sex or _something_ , but there is only silence.

He raps on the door, strong, unapologetic. Tony’s light is still on. Whatever he’s up to, he can spare Steve some time. A drink. A talk. Maybe more. He doesn’t think about it. Knocks the door again because he won’t be ignored.

‘Tony, it’s me. It’s Steve,’ he adds, because he doesn’t want to be Captain America tonight. ‘Jarvis told me you’re in there.’

He imagines Tony sitting on the other side, drinking alone, deliberately ignoring him. It burns a little, and he thinks maybe he should go. Pictures himself back in his apartment, sitting on blood stiff sheets and listening to his neighbours fuck.

He tries the door. Shouldn’t maybe, would’ve been better about a man’s privacy once, but he is here now and burning with the need to _do something._

The door isn’t locked. As it swings open, the stench of puke and whiskey are stagnant in the air.

He assesses, as the soldier in him always does. Just an overturned whiskey bottle seeping out across the carpet. Just the neat lines of white powder on the dresser. Just an almost empty bottle of unmarked pills. Just Tony, lying pale and still on top of satin bedsheets.

He looks for battle wounds, burns and bleeding. He can handle that, a lifetime of war has taught him how to stay calm and steady when he’s panicking inside. But the truth is, he already knows it isn’t that.

He read newspaper articles on Tony not so long ago, when they first started this team. Playboy extraordinaire gone off the rails. Suicide attempts. Just another dumb rich boy. They talked about his life like he was a fiction.

There’s puke on Tony’s pillow, crusted to his lips, it smells mostly of whisky and is tinged with the neon pink of Pepto Bismol.

Steve stands there in the doorway, feels dumb and useless, like a scared animal. _Don’t just stand here, get help._ He thinks of Tony dying from this, and can’t move. Stands there watching, holding his own breath as he waits for the sound or sight of Tony’s. _Please, please_ , because he can’t lose another one tonight. He is losing his people before they have a moment to become his.

He imagines Tony here alone, while Steve slept. Dwelling. Drowning his pain, numbing himself to it. Not numb enough. He steadies himself, buries Steve Rogers behind the soldier he has learned to be, and remembers how to move.

Feels Tony’s pulse and lets some of the tension drain away. Touches Tony, remembers his fantasies from earlier tonight and feels wrong for it. Tony is still and quiet and none of that carefree hedonist remains in this shell of a man.

He tries to call through the open door for help. Jarvis. But the mansion is too big and too empty and they are alone here in Tony’s gilded crypt. He fumbles for his phone, shaking fingers jabbing at the buttons.

_911, what’s your emergency?_

_My friend tried to kill himself._

He wonder if he can say _tried_ yet. Thinks of saying days from now, years from now, telling his grandchildren: _my friend killed himself._

‘What did you do, Stark?’

Steve shakes him and Tony’s eyes flutter open. ‘Too much coke,’ he slurs when he says it, but there’s a smile in his voice like he thinks this is funny.  His eyes drift closed again.

Steve wants to throw the phone across the room and walk away. Let Tony die like he was meant to. Tony chose this. Tony doesn’t give a fuck who he hurts and Steve shouldn’t either.

He sits there connected to the line with the operator’s assurances falling flat in his ears. _They’ll be there soon, sir, stay on the line._ He crushes the phone, sits there with Tony until the paramedics come and take him away.

\----

Tony shuts himself away from all of it. Flashes an easy smile at the paparazzi when he leaves the hospital and answers every question with a distraction. No candour now.

They go for drinks and sit in silence. He wants to ask why, but doesn’t because it doesn’t take much to imagine. If he were more like Tony, selfish and impulsive and still living for himself. Steve understands too much and hates Tony a little for showing him that.

Tony looks old. Steve feels old too.

When Tony gets up to leave, he kisses Steve on the cheek. ‘I'm fine, old boy,’ he says and sounds anything but. ‘I’m fine.’

**Author's Note:**

> On Tumblr [HERE](http://ironlawyer.tumblr.com/post/179147665957/fic-ungrounded).


End file.
